I find it’s a lot easier to prepare a table with Numbers than by hand. I was using this today and thought I’d share the how-to.

Step 1: Select the material you want to table-ize.

Step 2: Paste it into text edit. Numbers uses tab delimiters (at least it does for me).

Step 3: Use find/replace to replace all tabs with a vertical pipe symbol (|). Copy any of your tabs to populate the find field.

Step 4: Use find/replace to replace all newlines with the sequence pipe symbol – newline -pipe symbol. Copy a newline from your text to the find field and in the replace field type |, then paste the newline again, and then type | again.

Step 5: Add pipe signs to the start and end of your file. Before:

After:

Step 6: Duplicate the first line and replace all text between bars with dashes:

Step 7: If you have an empty left-top-corner like I do, add at least 3 dashes to the 2nd line between the first set of pipes:

And you’re done.